We talk a lot about rules and best practices in email, but we’re mostly talking about “squishy” rules-of-thumb that are based on simplified models of how mail systems, spam filters, recipients, postmasters and blacklist operators behave. They’re the biology, ecology and sociology of the email ecosystem. There’s another set of rules we tend to only mention in passing...
You’re setting up a company (or a new division or maybe even a new brand) and you’d like to use email to communicate with your customers. In this series of posts I’m going to touch on some of the things you can do today to make email life easier for you in the future. Today’s final post is on DNS hosting and setup. 5. DNS hosting DNS is what lets you actually use the domain you’ve...
You’re setting up a company (or a new division or maybe even a new brand) and you’d like to use email to communicate with your customers. In this series of posts I’m going to touch on some of the things you can do today to make email life easier for you in the future. Today, domain registration. 3. Not all registrars are created equal Each domain suffix (.com, .co.uk, .org, .biz, etc.) is run by...
You’re setting up a company (or a new division or maybe even a new brand) and you’d like to use email to communicate with your customers. In this series of posts I’m going to touch on some of the things you can do today to make email life easier for you in the future. Today, choosing a domain name. 2. What… is your name? Your domain name is the keystone of your online branding, and...
You’re setting up a company (or a new division or maybe even a new brand) and you’d like to use email to communicate with your customers. In this series of posts I’m going to touch on some of the things you can do today to make email life easier for you in the future, starting with the naming of companies. 1. Like cats, a company needs three different names A name that’s...
Go to your ESP customer login page and use “View Source” to look at the HTML (under “Page” on Internet Explorer, “Tools->Web Developer” on Firefox, and “View” on Safari). Go on, I’ll wait. Search for the word autocomplete. If it says something like autocomplete=”off” then your web developers have already thought about this...
This was posted to the IETF DKIM Working Group mailing list this morning: The dkim working group has completed its primary charter items, and is officially closing. The mailing list will be retained for future discussions involving dkim. The list archive will also be retained. The dkim working group was primarily focused on DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) Signatures and DomainKeys Identified...
There are a several approaches to authenticating email, and the different authentication methods have a lot of different settings to choose from (sometimes because they’re useful, other times just because they were designed by committee). It’s nice that they have that flexibility for the complex situations that might benefit from them, but almost all the time you just want to choose a...
Providing tagged email addresses to vendors is fascinating, and at the same time disturbing. It lets me track what a particular email address is used for, but also to see where and when they’ve leaked to spammers. I’d really like to know who leaked an email address, and when. All my inbound mail is sorted into “spam” and “not-spam” by a combination of...
I often find myself having to analyze volumes of email, looking for common factors, source addresses, URLs and so on as part of some “forensics” work, analyzing leaked emails or received spam for use as evidence in a case. For large volumes of mail where I might want to dig down in a lot of detail or generate graphical or statistical reports I tend to use Abacus to slurp in and...
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